Issue Twelve: Enough—Strategic Rebellion Against Extraction Culture (and Economics)
My word for 2026 is ENOUGH.
Not enough as in resignation, scarcity, or settling...tho my mother’s phrase “what you settle for is all you will get” ain't advice worth bucking. Enough as in: I know what constitutes meaningful success for my business, my life, my creative practice—and I'm drawing that line in the sand with intention and precision. Enough as in: I refuse to let scale and profit maximize serve as the exclusive metrics by which my business gets measured, judged, or valued.
But also: enough as in I've had ENOUGH. Of unsustainable algorithms. Of rage bait content and surveillance states. Of AI slop blurring reality. Of platforms designed to capture and control my attention, creativity, ideas—my power. Not to mention the failing institutions not supporting the needs of the communities they serve. Its as exhausting as it is unrewarding. The costs truly outweigh the benefits
This year is about dropping into more of my humanity — our humanity. My aim is to embrace a disciplined, practical, structured energy—loving boundaries, maturity, grace, intentionality. About transforming my relationship with the digital world, minimizing it, getting offline. Touching grass, supporting my community and clients, hugging my people, playing. Using online tools only where they support me, refusing them where they don't.
This is strategic rebellion.
And if you're a creative entrepreneur who's been told you're "thinking too small" because you won't sacrifice everything at the altar of being terminally online and striving for infinite growth, this newsletter is for you.
The Religion of Extraction
We're living through a moment where geopolitical economic greed has become its own religion. Private equity consolidation. Wealth concentration. Extraction until collapse. The systems designed by corporations, especially publicly owned ones in which shareholder value rules—like litrally increasingly infiltrating policy—have made profit maximization sacred while treating actual humans, communities, and the planet itself as profane.
But extraction economics doesn't just operate at the macro level. It's colonized the micro too.
It's infiltrated how we signal our worth through performative status games—what Russell Walter calls the exhausting chase-and-flight dynamic where middle-class professionals burn themselves out trying to prove they belong. It's invaded our media consumption, turning information into another thing we must optimize and extract value from rather than selectively engaging with. Barf. It's even taken over brand culture, where everything becomes about shareability over substance—what Viktor Wendt diagnoses as "enough brand dinners," fleeting performative moments designed for Instagram stories rather than genuine connection.
The pattern is everywhere: perform rather than be. Signal rather than build. Optimize rather than experience. Extract rather than circulate.
Charles Eisenstein calls this out brilliantly in Sacred Economics when he distinguishes between sacred versus profane economics. Sacred economics recognizes that some things hold value beyond what can be commodified and extracted. Profane economics—the dominant model we're all swimming in—treats everything as a resource to be monetized, scaled, and squeezed until there's nothing left.
This includes your attention. Your time. Your creative energy. Your status. Your relationships. Even your leisure.
If you look around, creativity is being disqualified as valuable, or meaningful to society.Its tragic and what we will lose collectively when we acquiesce is far more profound than I have to write about today. I believe creative entrepreneurs exist in the tension between these two models. And we're uniquely positioned to build something different.
Attention Doesn't Come From Scale Anymore
Ana Andjelic brilliantly articulates this in her recent piece on cultural fragmentation: "Cultural currency no longer comes from scale—it comes from attention. And attention is scarce, fleeting, and brutally competitive."
Culture fragments faster than it consolidates now. Mass attention is gone. The gap between actual cultural impact and mass visibility keeps widening—and creative entrepreneurs are uniquely positioned to operate in that gap, but we’’re going to have to change our habits, and get introspective about our dependency on external tools & resources that no longer support our best interests.
Where we invest in—our time, our attention, our energy, our money, our ideas—matters
Here's the thing: attention is captured by friction. By inversions, oddities, contradictions. By sharpening edges rather than smoothing them over. The brands and businesses that win don't conform to what's expected—they lean INTO what makes them distinct, even weird. (That’s like… literally why my business is called Weird Specialty).
IMO – Identifying your "enough" IS that friction.
When every other business is chasing infinite scale and replicating formulas meant to guarantee conversion & profit, your decision to design for sufficiency is an inversion. When extraction economics demands you optimize and expand endlessly, your choice to protect creative integrity over market domination is a contradiction worth paying attention to. When everyone else is smoothing edges to appeal to the broadest possible audience, you're sharpening yours while serving your niche.
This isn't thinking too small. This is being weird on purpose. And in a fragmented culture where attention matters more than scale, that's exactly the strategic position creative entrepreneurs should occupy.
When Productivity Becomes Extraction
Here's how insidious extraction economics has become: it's infiltrated even the way we listen.
A recent piece in The Atlantic articulated something I've been feeling but couldn't quite name. The writer confessed to a compulsion many of us share—
"[To] make every minute of the day as 'productive' as possible. By that blinkered calculus, an informative podcast will always trump music. But listening incessantly to podcasts has actually narrowed my interests and shown me just how limiting too much information can be."
I am soOOoOoOooOOo guilty of this!? YIKES.
Read that again. We've let productivity culture colonize our EARS. Even the supposedly leisurely act of listening to music gets measured against whether we're extracting enough information, enough value, enough optimization from those minutes. And I say god damn, the value of music seems to be lost on all of us.
And here's the devastating punchline:
"More recently, I've found that trying to make every listening minute count inevitably becomes counterproductive. The internal pressure to optimize free time and always multitask is ultimately exhausting, not enlightening."
Exhausting, not enlightening. This is an example of extraction economics right there folks!
More nuanced tho…this is extraction economics at its most intimate. It's the profane treating everything—even joy, even rest, even the experience of beauty—as something that needs to justify its existence through measurable output. And the promise is that all this optimization will enlighten us? It's a lie. It just depletes you.
And it's exactly what creative entrepreneurs are positioned to refuse.
I'm a huge advocate for this and I hope you all know it—your creative practice REQUIRES unmonetized time. It requires experiences that can't be measured. It requires prioritizing pleasure and play, without the need for those experiences to teach you something. Discovery of "impractical ideas" legitimately become transformative work and that can’t emerge from relentless consumption—they emerge from the spaces capitalism can't quantify.
Defining your enough means protecting these spaces, experiences and moments of staring at walls lost in our heads. It means refusing to let every moment become extractable data, optimization theater, productive output. It means recognizing that some of your most valuable creative work happens when you're technically doing "nothing."
Not everything needs to be, should be monetized… even though that’s what our culture subversively and often outright demands.
Depth Over Shareability
This extraction mindset has also colonized how we show up in our lives and communities.
Viktor Wendt calls it out perfectly: "Enough brand dinners." He's describing the epidemic of performative events designed for shareability rather than substance—pop-ups where everyone grabs their Instagram story and leaves after one song. Quick sugar rush, quick crash, zero lasting impact. Perhaps some monetary gain still, but returns are diminishing and authenticity lacks.
Oh yeah, this is a side bar… but authenticity is back.
The logic is seductive: visibility equals success. But as Wendt points out, genuine relationships require time. Research shows it takes 50 hours to move from acquaintances to friends, 90-100 hours to become good friends, 200 hours to build deep connection. A 30-minute activation capturing attention might spark curiosity, but it rarely builds community. Amiright?
The same extraction thinking applies to how creative entrepreneurs are encouraged to show up these days: constant visibility, performative expertise, shareability over depth. Create content that "lands." Optimize for engagement. Signal your worth through conspicuous displays of productivity, knowledge, cultural capital.
But what if you refused? What if WE COLLECTIVELY refused!? That’s a movement.
What if instead of chasing moments to pass, you created places to belong? What if instead of optimizing for shareability, you built for depth? What if you supported builders over performers—including yourself?
This is what "enough" looks like in practice, for me and the work I do with my clients anyways. It's choosing substance, and quality, over status signaling. It's protecting the unmonetized, unmeasured spaces where real creative work and genuine connection actually happen. And it's refusing to treat every interaction as an opportunity for extraction.
Enough with extraction!? I am SO over this mode of operating. It’s boring, exhausting, unrewarding and often damaging.
Circulation vs. Accumulation
Back to Eisenstein, he introduces the concept of negative interest in Sacred Economics—the idea that value naturally decays and circulates rather than accumulates infinitely. In nature, nothing grows forever. Things reach maturity, they fruit, they decay, they feed the next cycle. This is regenerative. This is sustainable.
We need to move from decay back into feeding the next cycle. New growth, fresh fruit — regeneration is calling.
Extraction economics operates on the opposite principle: accumulate infinitely, grow perpetually, concentrate wealth, scale until you've captured every possible market. This isn't growth. It's consumption. And it's exactly what creative entrepreneurs are positioned to refuse.
When you define your enough, you're choosing circulation over accumulation. Only then can you build business models that prioritize:
Craft quality over market saturation
Creative integrity before revenue optimization
Community value over addressable market size
Regenerative sustainability over extractive growth
This isn't playing small. This is playing DIFFERENT. And different is exactly what culture needs right now.
Strategic Refusal as Liberation
The correction I wrote about in December—the cultural shift away from technology-mediated optimization toward embodied intelligence, mystery, and human connection—requires entrepreneurs willing to refuse the entire extraction playbook.
Your "enough" is your refusal.
It's the line you draw that says:
I will not sacrifice my creative practice for scale.
I will not optimize my business at the expense of my quality of life.
I will not treat my clients/customers as units to be maximized.
I will not conform to metrics designed to measure extraction rather than value creation.
I will not play exhausting status games to prove I belong.
I will not consume information like it's another productivity metric.
I will not perform my worth for shareability when I could build for depth and thriving.
I will not let productivity culture colonize my ears, my calendar, my creative process, my humanity.
And here's what happens when you make that refusal:
You get your creative freedom back.
You get your calendar back.
You get your attention back.
You get to design a business around how you want to live and prioritizes what you want to create in the world, not what capitalism constitutes as "success."
You get to be the countercultural economic model that refuses to participate in greed-driven systems displacing care for actual humans.
You get to build places that matter instead of moments that pass.
YOU GET TO MARCH TO THE BEAT OF YOUR OWN DRUM.
Liberation baby. Say it with me!
What's Your Enough?
Here's what I love about the word ENOUGH: it has two meanings that together tell the whole story.
Enough, adjective: As much or as many as required or wanted; sufficient in quantity or number.
But also: Of something undesirable: present in a greater amount than is tolerable or expected.
Your "enough" is both. It's the line that says "this is sufficient"—AND the line that says "this undesirable thing has exceeded what I'll tolerate."
I'm asking myself this question throughout 2026, and I'm inviting you to ask it too:
What's your enough for revenue? For client capacity? For visibility? For growth?
What does meaningful success look like when profit and scale aren't the exclusive measures?
What becomes possible when you design a business that serves your vision rather than conforming to someone else's framework for domination?
And equally important:
What extraction have you tolerated that's exceeded your threshold?
What optimization theater is present in greater amount than you can bear?
Where have the costs begun to outweigh the benefits?
The creative entrepreneurs who define their enough aren't being small-minded. They're being strategic rebels. They're building conscientious, purpose-oriented businesses that challenge the extraction economics infiltrating everything around us. They're being weird on purpose in a cultural moment that rewards friction over conformity.
And that's exactly the kind of entrepreneurship that matters right now.
Welcome to 2026. The year of ENOUGH.
#getwithit
—gJ
Resources & Further Reading
On Sacred vs. Profane Economics: Sacred Economics: Money, Gift, and Society in the Age of Transition by Charles Eisenstein — The foundational text on circulation vs. accumulation, negative interest, and gift economies
On Cultural Fragmentation & Attention: Weird on Purpose by Ana Andjelic — How attention comes from friction rather than scale in fragmented culture; why brands that sharpen edges win over those that smooth them
On Productivity Culture's Infiltration: "Podcasts, Music, and the Productivity Trap" (The Atlantic, December 2025) — How optimization culture colonizes even our leisure, making every listening minute "count" until it becomes exhausting rather than enlightening
On Status Games & Performance: A Gentle Introduction to Status by Russell Walter — The exhausting chase-and-flight dynamics of middle-class status signaling and conspicuous consumption
On Performative Culture & Depth: Enough Brand Dinners – Feed the Culture by Viktor Wendt — Why fleeting, shareable moments fail to build genuine connection; the case for supporting builders over performers and creating depth over gloss
On Intentional Consumption: The Monday Media Diet with Anu Lingala — How to engage with information intentionally rather than extractively; friction as emerging cultural framework
